Last Christmas I spent a week drifting down the Danube and I filled a sketchbook with impressions, images and ideas. Most of the drawings were of reflections on the ship windows, mixed with images visible through the windows and objects (mainly plants) between me and the windows. I liked the ambiguity of the drawings, the juxtaposition of the different types of image and the way they seemed to suggest stories and questions that reflected the experience of the journey.

I made a series of twenty monotype paintings, which I began in a workshop in Florence in May this year. Most of the paintings went through four or five stages, where I added colour and marks or removed sections. This is a selection from the completed series.

I’m not sure if I’ve finished this series yet because there are several more ideas that I might return to soon.

This year Paul and I are showing work at the Fish Factory in Brighton Road, Worthing for the Worthing Artists Open Houses trail (from June 16th – July 1st 2018, more info http://www.worthingartistsopenhouses.com).

‘Rock Pool’ is a carborundum print, the image developed from watercolour studies of rockpools.

This etching began as a study of a rock at Marazion, in Cornwall. There were intricate layers of dark and light strands, reminding me of how rocks document their own history, through their slow development of form.

This is an older image that always reminds me of living by the sea. The image is of John, one of the last local fishermen to still push his boat out from the beach to fish here. I wanted to hang this etching/collage here because we often eat his catch here as our fish and chips!

]]>https://vivmartin1.wordpress.com/2018/06/10/exhibition-at-the-fish-factory/feed/0vivmartin1Tales of the riverbankhttps://vivmartin1.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/tales-of-the-riverbank/
https://vivmartin1.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/tales-of-the-riverbank/#commentsThu, 04 Jan 2018 17:05:32 +0000http://vivmartin1.wordpress.com/?p=540Continue reading →]]>We spent last Christmas floating down the Danube. Last year I had made a series of prints from my drawings of the Rhine riverbanks, which used some of the reflections on windows and water as part of the image. This time, I made the reflections the starting point of most of my drawings, choosing to focus on the windows that we normally look right through. Here are some pages from my sketchbook:

This is a mixture of the bridge, the street lights and the river running beneath, with a plant and the lights in the cabin.

Another window looked out to a church and had reflections from a window behind me.

The bridge again, this time drawn from a different angle.

This was an evening when people were dancing and many were waving their hands in the air – seen reflected in a window where I was watching the river go by.

A daytime view of winter river banks, when the sun was low and light flashed onto windows, making bright zig-zags and hints of rainbows.

Another daytime drawing, with detail in the windows reflected on windows.

Christmas Day in Budapest – lots of inside lights overlaying the views outside.

Now I’m looking forward to developing prints or paintings from these ideas. I like the feeling of starting the New Year with new ideas, although I still have a lot of work still in progress from last year!